Music and Maths

Last Saturday a very unusual concert took place in the College Chapel, devised by Visiting Fellow Pablo Padilla (National University of Mexico).

It presented nine world premieres of compositions based on different mathematical concepts and procedures (algorithmic, geometric, combinatorial) as applied to music.
This was part of Prof Padilla's ongoing project 'Formal Methods in Musicology' in collaboration with Francis Knights (Music DoS at Fitzwilliam) and Dr Dan Tidhar (Wolfson College), which is exploring mathematical, statistical and computational techniques for the analysis of classical music.
A number of professional musicians from Cambridge took part, and the music was largely the work of invited composers from the Colchester New Music organization. The most unusual scoring heard was that for piano, harpsichord, organ, viola and recorder, which posed interesting tuning challenges for the keyboard instruments!

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